Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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146 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana During this cycle of activity, we also began working with the Community Empowerment Service (Dinas Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Desa, PMD), rather than with the Planning Agency or the Forest Service. We shared more values regarding community empowerment with PMD and this agency’s officials were enthusiastic about the collaboration. The possibilities for spontaneous cooperation therefore seemed more likely with PMD. As an example, PMD officials who joined us in a monitoring trip in October 2002 used the opportunity to promote their Gerbang Desa Mandiri program, designed to promote village economic self-sufficiency. Traveling together also built stronger relationships with villagers. Such collaboration can have its downsides, however. During a second monitoring trip in May 2003, PMD’s agenda to redefine village settlements dominated the process, requiring our field team to make followup visits to many villages. We concluded that joint monitoring made sense only when there was a shared agenda and our schedule was flexible. Meanwhile, the inaction resulting from our collaboration with government seemed to be causing communities to lose their trust in us. We did not want to be accused of working independently on matters that should be the domain of government, yet delays, a lack of responsiveness and inaction in implementation suggested that nothing would happen unless we took the lead. As facilitators and a research organisation, we had limited scope for interventions. In this way, the capacity of local government departments and their own bureaucratic requirements can pose severe limits to cooperation. One disadvantage of working more strategically and with a lower profile was that our function became less visible and transparent. Some community members viewed the last stage of our work as redundant and unnecessary because we supported government programs like reforestation that they would have access to anyway. Communities also wanted us to work with the approval of the district government, despite understanding that it was precisely this relationship that had stalled many of the villagers’ initiatives. We thus found our work increasingly boxed in by the need to make difficult tradeoffs. For example, we were caught in the dilemma of how to move ahead with activities with communities while maintaining our relationship with local government. We continued to prioritise the relationship with local government, which was the most powerful actor and authority in the area. Yet this is a trap for collaborative approaches. It can cause them to stall in
Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 147 the inertia of ‘feeling good about each other’, which blinds everyone to the lack of effective action. It also means that the group with the most power can control the agenda at the likely cost of benefits to more marginalised groups. Under the New Order of Soeharto, central government controlled the agenda but was too remote to understand communities’ needs. Now district governments are seeking to control the agenda but have little capacity or flexibility to address communities’ priorities except where there are coincidental convergences of interests. Our conclusion is that empowering marginalised groups requires a strategy for securing the long-term support of controlling authorities while creating the space to work with different entities within that authority and independently in the short term. It may also require constructive confrontation rather than collaboration, as long as that confrontation does not backfire and hurt the groups it intended to benefit. Underlying either approach is the need for political sensitivity and savvy to understand and work with local power relations constructively (Forester 1989). We feel strongly that collaboration needs to be pursued as a means, not as an end in itself. In this current phase we are moving cautiously forward with programs that we hope will better complement government yet not be dependent on their actions. We seek a less proactive role and rely more on coincidental convergences of interests. Ironically, taking this role allowed us to appreciate more fully the existing spontaneous order of cooperation and how to work within it. With such an uneven and complex set of relationships, interdependencies among groups become problematic. Achieving any kind of direct coordinated action (beyond organising single events) becomes difficult, even with patience, a willingness to compromise and a reasonable budget. It is not clear that these diverse groups are willing or able to solve their problems themselves, even with facilitation (Hagmann 1999). Under such complex circumstances, each group needs space to manoeuvre independently. Cooperation occurs as a spontaneous order (diZerega 2000) in which participants pursue their own ends and mutually adjust to one another; it is polycentric, rather than guided by a single organisation. In spontaneously organised cooperation, competition can exist and even promote more rigorous outcomes than it would in the self-organised orders of science, markets or democracy (diZerega 2000). Spontaneous orders can incorporate more complex relationships and information because they
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Adaptive Collaborative Management o
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Copyright © 2007 by Center for Int
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iv • Contents Chapter 5. Muddling
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vi • Foreword problem solving. Th
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viii • About the Contributors God
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Acknowledgements In early 1999, two
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Chapter 1. Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 1: Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative M
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Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collabo
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Chapter 4. Shaping Opportunities fo
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Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from
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Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusio
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CIFOR is a leading international fo
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